This post is based on several in-person and several email interviews which Kevin Kangas was kind enough to give his time towards. They all took place in the summer of 2011.
A much shorter version of this interview was published in the Winter 2011-2012 issue of the Maryland Writer's Association e-zine Pen in Hand.
Kevin was born in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and grew up in Glen Burnie and Severna Park, along with two brothers and a sister. His brother Paul is a professional artist and helps with storyboards and paintings, as well as make-up and visual design on some of Kevin's films. In fact, Kevin's entire family has played several roles in his films, from grips to extras to help with constructing sets, and all are supportive.
About his childhood, Kevin says "I just grew up loving to write and create. My parents also loved movies, often taking us to the cinema or the drive-in." He attended Severna Park High School, Anne Arundel Community College, then University of Maryland Baltimore County, as a Computer Science major. But once Kevin sat in an elective film course at UMBC (Film 101), that solidified a direction he'd been thinking of pursuing - making films. Instead of switching to film major, he simply dropped out after finishing up the year. In 1996, he started a comic-book store, Empyre Comics, which was open until July 2011, when, to the distress of its many fans, it closed its doors permanently. Kevin's love of comics came in useful for his film-making, because during the filming of {\it Hunting Humans}, he was so poor he had to sleep in his comic-book store for about 6 months. His experience of writing screenplays since the age of 18 paid off with a job as a script reader for a Los Angeles agency, where he worked for several years.
Since then, he has filmed Hunting Humans, Fear of Clowns, Fear of Clowns, 2, Bounty, and Garden of Hedon. The first three are out on DVD, Bounty was just released on Video on Demand and various other pay-per-view outlets, and Garden of Hedon has just recently (as of summer 2012) wrapped up the final stages of post-production.
At the B-Movie Film Festival (2002), Hunting Humans was nominated for Best Action Sequence, Best Actor (Rick Ganz), Best Editing (Kevin Kangas), Best Movie, Best Music (Evan Evans), Best Villian (Aric Blue), Best Writing (Kevin Kangas). It won a B-Movie Award for Best action sequence, and also for Best editing. At the Los Angeles DIY Film Festival (2002), it won the Festival Prize for Best Screenplay (Kevin Kangas). Kevin’s second movie Fear of Clowns grossed over $3 million worldwide, earning more than any other Lionsgate film of its budget level at the time of release. At the B-Movie Film Festival (2005), Rick Ganz and Frank Lama were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor, Paul Kangas for Best Make-up Effects, and Kevin Kangas for Best Editing.
Kevin has written many other screenplays, including Red Fish Blue Fish for Tom Proctor, which is in pre-production.
Question: You love comics. Which came first, the comic-book store or your film-making?
Kevin: My Empyre Comics store pre-dates by start of film-making. The store wasn’t profitable enough to fund any of my movies but I did sell most of my comic collection to raise the original 11000 dollars for Hunting Humans. That money was used to hire the DP, and so on. I always said, I’d let the store keep going as long as it paid for itself. Until recently, it paid for itself and allowed me to do a few other things. Recently, keeping the store afloat has started to dip into me, and I won’t let that happen. I love comics but I don’t love them enough to go broke.
I’ve thought of making a movie based on a comic, but comic book intellectual property is expensive to license. I’ve also thought of writing my own comic book-style movie but I don’t have an interesting slant at this point to add. If that occurred to me, I would do it, but right now, no. I debate about writing a story with an urban realism, a Daredevil-type movie, verses one which requires a lot of special effects. In the back of my mind it is there.
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Question: Your film company’s name is “Maurader Productions” but the website URL is http://www.kangaskahnfilms.com/. Where did the name come from?
Kevin: In High School, kids used to call me “Kangas Khan.” I kind of liked the sound of the name. It was a way to honor the family name by putting it up there and I just changed the spelling. Now I think about it, I’m not even sure why!
Question: Can you talk about the pre-history of your film Hunting Humans? What was the story leading up to it?
Kevin: There was a guy named Rick Ganz, the lead actor in Hunting Humans, who I worked with a lot in those days. He has since retired form acting but at the time was pretty hard-core into getting projects off the ground. There were two movies were were trying to get done.
One project we worked on was “Lucky Ones,” a script I wrote that was kind of a standard horror movie with some fun and some gore and many of the clich ́es you see in horror movies. We were very very close to getting that one done. We had actually cast that movie with local actors, and were ready to go forward, but it was all set in one particular location. It was a lake setting with some piers, a very particular location. We lost the location within a month of shooting. We had no back-up plan. There was nothing anywhere like that we could go to instead. So that project went in the crapper, basically.
Rick then came up with an project he called “High.” It was in what I call the-slacker-with-a-gun genre. It was about a slacker who stumbles into something he really shouldn’t have. Rick wrote a rough draft of the first 15 pages of a script, but it had some funny moments in it. I pushed the plot into what I guess I’d call El Mariachi by the end of the movie. A lot of gunfights and blood. There wasn’t much justification of the premise, other than a back-story we made up about how the guy had a military father who taught him how to shoot. It turns out that is the only thing he is actually good at. On the whole though, the script was pretty bad. Still, we started casting it.
Half-way through casting “High”, I started brainstorming the Hunting Humans idea. It’s an story very close to me. A lot of what I think is very funny, if you know what I think. The main character in Hunting Humans has kind of an “Annie Hall”-type monologue going. He seems so nice and friendly. But then you hear what he is actually thinking and it is almost funny because it is so mean and cruel and the opposite of what he seems. He is so obsessed with patterns and stalking people that he doesn’t notice that someone else, another serial killer, has noticed his stalking. This other stalker just happens upon him, and thinks to himself “Whoa, this guy likes stalking and killing people too.” I wanted to see these two to play a game with each other, mano-e-mano. It was what is called “high concept.” I thought it was an interesting idea and no one had done anything like it. I would ask people about the idea. When I would pitch them the one-liner, their eyes would ight up and they would say “Hey, that’s pretty cool. I’d like to see a movie like that.” You rarely get that light when you explain to people a low-budget horror movie concept. Sometimes you get the faked, “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” but you tell they really mean “oh, whatever.” But I could tell with the Hunting Humans concept, people seemed genuinely interested and I knew I was onto something good. I got Rick Ganz to play the lead and after that it was pretty much friends and family. I think there are two other parts that were filled by mid-level actors, but some of the acting is so bad it is laugh- out-loud funny. But Rick is very strong. If they don’t like his portrayal in there, it is all my fault. He is exactly what I wanted him to be. he is also in Fear of Clowns. He is very, very good at playing mean and evil, as in Hunting Humans, but I think he has a harder time playing an emotionally available character, as in Fear of Clowns. He has a hard time showing any kind of weakness. If a man shows any kind of weakness, it is slightly embarrassing to a macho kind of guy and he wasn’t a talented enough actor to get past that. There are times in Hunting Humans where he comes off fake, which works in that movie because when his character seems to be nice, it is fake. The main character just doesn’t like anyone! He’d rather kill you than look at you.
By the time I started writing Hunting Humans, I had written 8 or 9 scripts. Writing Hunting Humans was very easy. At first, it was more of a character study than a story. I wrote about 20 pages fairly quickly, showing him killing people and basically I was just trying to keep it interesting in the way he was plotting and going about his killing. I don’t think movies had shown that sort of character before. Really, he was based on how I was in college. I was a little insane in college. I would actually follow people. Who knows why. It was research for writing, perfectly normal stuff! Anyway, a lot of these inner monologues in the movie were actually easy to write. Then the part about the second serial killer struck me and I rewrote the script to emphasize the big plot point where he discovers that there is someone following him, and killing people that he has been following!
The movie was shot in 16 mm. At one point, I ran out of money and couldn’t pay my rent, so had to sleep in my store Empyre Comics. Even then I ran out of money to buy film, so my girlfriend at the time lent me money for the film needed to finish the movie. After the filming was done, the film sat at the processing lab for about a year and a half. After filming was done, I was totally broke. However, I submitted the script to a film festival and forgot about it. I received no acknowledgement, nothing. Then one day, I’m reading some film-makers newsgroup and saw the announcement of the winners of the film festival I submitted it to. I read “Best Screenplay Award goes to ...” and I went “What? I won something! I’ve never won an award in my life. Holy crap!” I got some sort of plaque and a Final Cut training session that I never used. But that was pretty great.
Part 1 is continued here in Part 2.
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